Now I've had my problems with CNN before... they apparently haven't read the Geneva Conventions that restrict media from putting out information about someone that has been killed in a warzone until the family has been notified and authorities approve of what is put out. That is awful... but when folks are stuck in an immediate situation with killers on the loose in a hotel, like a British couple in Mumbai, could you get any lower than actually broadcasting where they are? Because the terrorists found out, and it is only with sheer luck the couple were rescued.
CNN: Not only blatantly breaking treaty obligations their Nation of origin has signed on to, showing gross disregard for the Law of Nations, acting callously towards the loved ones of deceased soldiers but now actively helping terrorists to kill innocents and shred civilization. This is beyond being in the Voluntary Fifth Column... this is permanently SOS!
The BBC for doing the same in Mumbai in another incident, save this leading to a fatality? SOS!
After decades of terrorism in India, the Mumbai police are: 1) Armed with WWI era rifles as their 'heavy weapons', 2) Admit they are not trained to counter a major threat, 3) Did not fire on one or two gunmen who were out in the open and had a clear shot as they were cowering behind cover. Remember when those two gunmen robbed a bank in LA and they had on complete body armor and multiple AK-47s? What did those police do? They fired on the gunmen and kept up firing while heading to sports stores to get some bigger bore weapons... they were, finally, taken down by just wearing the gunmen down and disabling vehicles. After hundreds of spent rounds they were stopped. By the police.
If your Nation is so asinine as to restrict gun ownership may I suggest that those that actually enforce the law are trained on how to use their weapons against armed terrorists who have decided to take up a bit of Private War in your city? The police force of Mumbai: SOS!
Then there is the bozo brigade:
Alex Witt of MSNBC, news anchorman, who thought that the world would be oh-so-impressed by Barack Obama that terrorism would take a few days off, you sir are SOS.
Depak Chopra who thinks that US foreign policy is the cause of Mumbai when Pakistan has been actively funding terrorist organizations in Kasmir and India, itself, since the 1950's, you are also SOS!
After that there is active Obama cheerleader George Stephanopolous who thinks that Obama was somehow the cause of the uptick on Black Friday's sales. We have not seen a downtick in sales for a couple of decades now, so this is the same old, same old. BTW, if you are going to say that every little thing is due to Obama, then we can blame him for the stock market meltdown and Mumbai, now, can't we according to this logic? Yes, you could. Unfortunately the universe does not revolve around Barack Obama. This sort of thinking is childish to such an extreme that even children would scratch their heads at it. Therefor, George Stephanopolous is SOS, and pretty much permanently, it seems.
I thought 'hope and change' was supposed to be for the *better*? Then why is Barack Obama appointing one of the people responsible for letting Osama Bin Laden get away during the Clinton Administration to the UN? Yes! Change BACK to 9/10!! That is a move of an individual that is SOS, and he will be our President.
Marie Arana thinks that Barack Obama isn't black. Barack Obama campaigned as a black man during his 'dire warnings of how his opponents would paint him', which you may recall includes a funny name and being black. Apparently HE thinks he is black, and so does just about anyone who looks at him and it doesn't matter if that person is from Kenya, Iraq, Russia, China or the South Side of LA. Marie Arana is SOS in the worst possible way and is ignoring the racism used during the campaign by Barack Obama to play up how different he was.
Tom Friedman in the NYT obviously is trying to paint that the good things going on in Iraq are NOT due to the surge, not due to the stalwart activities of our armed forces since the invasion, not due to the economic and political help we have given Iraq, and not due to the democratic process that has been established there. No, he thinks it is due to Barack Obama! That is so asinine and disrespectful of the hard work put in for years and the thousands of deaths to get to this point that it is despicable. Not only is the NYT another member of the Voluntary Fifth column, but Tom Friedman is SOS. Obviously out to get some dinner party invitations in DC.
When you cannot even begin to understand cause and effect, cannot understand what holds civilization together, and the media that pushes this junk out to the general population is the one showing just how to be uncivilized, you learn that barbarism does not mean you have to pick up a battle-axe and go rampaging through the countryside. No, you just have to forget what it means to be civilized and then buy on to the first passing whimsy that comes your way and put away reason. That will get a civilization killed in the end.
That is decadent: expecting the world to change just because you *want it to be different*.
Children understand, as they grow up, that this does not work. They become adults who understand this. Now we have adults functioning as children and purveying that to the larger population. And it is we, the members of civilization that pay for this in the steady drip of blood in the streets by killers that go unaddressed, by problems that defy simplistic solutions and by people who just don't believe that civilization is worth fighting for because it just might hurt to do so.
The dead in each and every terrorist attack on this planet are proof that the cost of not doing so is horrific beyond all measure.
Whenever you hear someone stating such childish ideas, putting forth non-reason in the place of reason and doing so because they just want everything to be 'nice' and work out well, you have just heard an individual in the state of SOS.
Stuck On Stupid.
They aren't ignorant, as they should have learned this stuff, learned how to reason and learned that good intentions can wind up in blood at your feet because you want to be 'nice' to those that have decided to forego civilization and go back to the ways of Nature. Nature isn't nice. Mother Nature has eliminated over 95% of every species that has ever existed on this planet, and does a gruesome piece of work at it.
This is how you lose civilization - by being nice. Soon it becomes 'please don't kill me'.
And then you die because you have become prey and could not fight back.
There is nothing noble about that, as terrorists and pirates and rogue armies of thieves have shown since the dawn of civilization.
It is barbaric to become like that as the understanding that reason and its use to protect yourself and your society is a boon to both. You cannot trust government to protect you when any individual can revert back to the state of Nature and hide it until your back is turned to them. No vast army can protect you from that. No police force can. Your hope is they will kill someone else, first, and lots of them before they get to you. When you state you are against the civil means of Public War on all counts, you have just signed your death warrant and invitation to be enslaved. Ghandi, if you may remember, was not killed by the British but by a common man turned heartless killer: his ways did NOT win that individual over.
The Peacemakers are blessed as they teach you how to protect yourself and KEEP the peace.
Now we have forgotten that as a society.
And when the killer comes to you, will you defend yourself or will you beg for mercy from a man turned back into his Natural state, a being without mercy?
If you want peace, you had best not expect mercy from those men turned back to animals, who have turned away from the boon of reason and civilization. They do not want peace. And we are not teaching them how to be Peacemakers fast enough as they now freely kill in many lands.
That is failure.
Yours and Mine.
For this all depends on you to protect yourself and you to join with your fellow man to create society and for you to make sure you get these problems addressed so that all Nations understand that this is barbaric, this concept of not stopping our fellow man from turning on us. If you think war by Nations is horrific, wait until the other type comes to you: it has no reason, no provocation, no answer and no mercy.
Supporting Friends and Allies
8 comments:
Hi -
I was wondering what SOS meant. I took it to be Sack Of Shit, but yours is better, not quite so undiplomatic.
Great post, as always. :-)
Thank Gen. Honore, USACE - he used it during Katrina to refer to the press and it has stuck with me. So many that have an SOS out... they just don't know it.
Piracy. Terrorism. The state of nature where the strong prey on the weak. That's one of the reasons I moved away from the coast and into the intermountain west where all my neighbors have hunting rifles--usually displayed in the truck windows. "An armed society is a polite society." -R.H. Heinlein.
-cp
No government, no police force, no one can protect the individual when our fellow man returns to the State of Nature to take up all their liberties and wage war upon mankind. We are civilized as we invest our negative liberties into government to protect society, but the liberty of defending oneself may not be divorced from the right to do so: we invest the aggressive, outward liberty to government but that defensive, positive liberty is retained by the people.
It is time to take up arms for one's defense as the society crumbles, standards evaporate and our fellow man has no sanction against him for returning to Nature to wage Private War. It is the individual who is to be armed, not society: we are not Spartans. The armed individual creates politeness and civility, thus civilization, when the cost of waging Private War goes from nothing to ultimate cost. Being armed is not the object of society, which is the positive good we create: it is that of the individual to create that society by being armed. We dare not place that into society as that would be an attempt to divorce us from our inalienable right. We cannot trust society to defend us as individuals: that is our own responsibility.
Good points. I'm sure Heinlein would agree that civiilized society exists because of the willingness of certain individuals to defend it. Uncivilized societies (such as most of our cities have become) are not able to tolerate or inspire the fealty of the individual.
We are separated by tribal politics.
Civilization is a thin, crunchy coating on the outside; deep currents of wrathful, selfish savagery on the inside.
The coating is wearing thin in spots. -cp
The disturbing thing is that the antecedents in history do not point to good things ahead. When Rome was no longer an assimilative force, the barbarians worked away at the edges while the citizenry became decadent - going into a societal decay that would not support a common society. While we highlight the debauchery, we forget just how decayed that society was, where the barbarians were the ones fighting for Rome. Without social support the Armies would not only control Rome, but also be unable to defend it. That was a slow process...
A faster one was at the end of the Bronze Age where minor shifts in climate, particularly Anatolia but also the Aegean Basin, and a set of interconnected societies no longer keeping up strong connections went under. The Hittites, as they were, would disappear and the later ones by that name had little in common with the former... the City States of Greece would succumb to internal struggles and the coming of the Sea Peoples. Even Egypt was hard pressed for tens of decades, barely surviving that onslaught. Assyria went down, Babylon faltered. When the trade went down it all went down.
Spain, by taking in so much gold in the New World was causing a problem with the value of gold and silver: it plummeted. All that gold coming in and worth less and less each boatload. Defenses grew thing and then the pirates appeared to harry Spain. Only by banding together did the other European Nations start to curb the collapse of that trade network. That and the Little Ice Age made things very touch-and-go for a few centuries, all the way up to the 19th century.
Now we see worldwide trade problems, wild fluctuations in prices of commodities, and societies that will not confront those who take up war on their own. The result?
The return of Private War to start the process of disintegrating societies and their trade networks. Pirates, who never really left the scene fully in the Asian Seas, now return to the Indian Ocean and parts of the Atlantic. Terrorists and pirates are the symptom and aggrevating factor: we do not address their uncivilized behavior.
We have forgotten that mercy is due to the civilized only.
We shall pay for that.
It's bound to happen here again. Dyn-O-Bama (and the rest of us) better be ready to roll.
I am not expecting Woodrow Wilsonesque forms of repression, but the actual decay of understanding what it means to be civilized. We do not address infrastructure, so that we live only on what our parents and grandparents left us. That will kill a civilization as readily as anything else by letting the simple things that extend life go to hell.
We are already losing civility in our larger social structure and no longer upholding it as it isn't 'nice': it stifles negative self-expression and you just can't *do* that, donchyaknow? Of course not doing that encourages uncivil behavior and the loss of civilization in a greater sense: we no longer understand civil life, civil government nor civil needs. That, too, is a definition of barbarism - not understanding the needs of civilization.
It may not be a fast breakdown, although such things can cascade, but the gangs armed with weapons of war, like MS-13, and those backed by the Red Mafia, point to that slow unraveling of civilized norms.
Therefore civility must be enforced in each of our lives *first*, and that requires time, energy, and emotional fortitude as the minions of uncivil behavior are willing to use government to destroy those things. If we do believe, as we state as a people, that these things are our responsibility, then we must do them *first* for ourselves and then seek to spread them outwards and upwards.
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